Alice Walker

I think America has always been polarized.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

I just feel that 'The Color Purple,' which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

I used to meditate all the time in bed. That was when I was raising my daughter, and I'd get her up and off to school, and then I would go back to bed and meditate. And then I would do the same in the evening, and that was very good for that period because I had so many things to juggle as a single mother.

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don't do that, we really deserve the world we get.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don't think it's intelligent, and it's not sane. So why would you want to support it?

I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

I consider the fact that thousands of children die each day from starvation and a lack of medicine a crisis for humanity and a problem we must collectively attempt to solve.

It is crucial that young people are taught sustainable child production and rearing.

We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.

I start each book when it's ready and never before.

You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.